Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday June 27, 2009 @07:16AM
from the alternative-views dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative power of technology to battle an oppressive state have pointed to Iran as a test case. However, as Farhad Manjoo writes on Slate, the real conclusion about news now coming out of Iran is that for regimes bent on survival, electronic dissent is easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past. Using a system installed last year, built in part by Nokia and Siemens, the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point, using the capabilities of deep packet inspection to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. 'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,' writes Manjoo. The effects of this control have been seen over the past couple days, with only a few harrowing pictures and videos getting through Iran's closed net. For most citizens, posting videos and even tweeting eyewitness accounts remains fraught with peril, and the same tools that activists use can be used by the government to spread disinformation. The government is also using crowdsourcing by posting pictures of protesters and asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. 'If you think about it, that's no surprise,' writes Manjoo. 'Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?'"

You can help. Get involved by going over to the NedaNet Resources Page [catb.org] and setting up a squid proxy or, better yet, a Tor proxy, to help the Iranian dissidents. This is a real, live underground network, being run by Eric Raymond and some other folks who are remaining anonymous.

Since they have a single choke-point, can the Iranian regime do a Man In The Middle attack on the entire country? They'd have to do something about the certificates that get pre-installed on new computers. (China's powerful enough for that, but not Iran.) I'm not sure they can manage this. However, they can insure that the real certs won't work, and could then distribute "patches" for that. They could also cook up their own "cache" for 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera with the bogus certs.

This would let them snoop on all public-key based cryptosystems, like SSL. However, they would need enough processing power to quickly do all of the key negotiation for the entire country in real-time. (I suspect that China can afford resources like that for this purpose, but not Iran.)

Eh? The GFW has been known to run out of capacity at peak times and stop reliably blocking things. They don't even have the resources to do stream re-assembly, splitting the stopwords across packet boundaries is enough to defeat it. I don't think they'll be decrypting traffic in realtime anytime soon.

unless the proxy you setup is inside the iranian infrastructure (ie, on the iran side of the choke-point), it's going to be relatively worthless, since the chokepoint will show the traffic from iran going to your proxy. realistically you've got few options:
- install on the inside, so when the chokepoint logs say "it's $PROXY_IP doing it", your lack of logs protects those that connected to your proxy
- route around the chokepoint, for which you'll need access to infrastructure that will be difficult to secu

If the article is accurate - and all traffic goes through a single chokepoint - wouldn't that mean that even connections to anonymizing proxies are also going through that chokepoint, and thus leading back to their users before those users are safely proxied?

The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.

You mean, as opposed to the democracy they had in the early 1950s, before the US (and UK) overthrew it to install a dictator who could be trusted to do what the US/UK wanted? The dictator who the US was still trying to prop up in 1979 when the current crop of religious nuts (is "religious nuts" redundant? probably.) took power? Should we not condemn the American and B

It remains illegal to export or reexport strong cryptography to Iran. Despite Phil Zimmerman's testimony before Congress, and despite his presentation of letters from people around the world who used PGP to save lives, there are still restrictions on who we may export this sort of software to. I have no doubt that the protestors in Iran would benefit immensely if they were using PGP or some similarly strong crypto, but here in the US, you could be imprisoned for sending it to them.

Oh please, you don't actually think aiding dissidents in a foreign country is legal do ya? The only thing stopping Iran from demanding the extradition of these people is that they are anonymous.. except for Eric S. Raymond, and who wants him in their country?

First of all, I thought in the US (and many other countries), it were the rule, that if you murdered foreign people, and did other bad things to them, you would in the first place be a "hero", as long as they are officially the "evil ones". (Example: The "soldiers".)

Then, do you really think, Iran can demand *anything* from the USA? lol. You must be out of your mind!

Whether something is legal does not matter. What matters is what is the possible punishment, what is the chance to get caught, what is the gain.

And here the possible punishment is, essentially, nonexistant. Do you honestly think the US administration (or any administration in the self proclaimed 'free world') would extradit one of their citizens to Iran, for whatever reasons whatsoever? Obama already got some heat from the right wing for being "soft"

The past called and says you shouldn't be living there any more. The days when anybody cared about the U.S. trying to keep the genie in a bottle are long gone. Uh, the rest of the world understands technology too and is fully capable of working with it. GnuPG is mirrored around the world.

Actually, there are still plenty of people who care. The company I work for ships software that uses OpenSSL, and the policy on Iran (and other countries on the "black list") is simple: if I receive an email from someone in Iran, I must immediately forward it to the corporate communications department, I must not reply, and I must not in any way communicate to them how they can obtain our software. This is despite the fact that OpenSSL could easily be obtained in Iran. The same policy applies to anyone

The company I work for ships software that uses OpenSSL, and the policy on Iran (and other countries on the "black list") is simple: if I receive an email from someone in Iran, I must immediately forward it to the corporate communications department

As you say, they can easily obtain OpenSSL in Iran or anywhere else in the world. The point is, if you can't send it to them, SO WHAT -- from their viewpoint. They can get it. So if what you ship is open source, just mark OpenSSL as a "requires." If it's not open source... my sympathies for having an unenlightened employer.

I did not say it was not available, nor did I say that the only crypto experts in the world lived in the US; I said we could not export or reexport crypto systems. The reexport clause is where the real problem lies -- it could be illegal to direct an Iranian to a mirror of NSS or OpenSSL even if the mirror were not in the US, since that is technically reexporting the software.

So if I wanted to help the Iranian protestors by telling them how to set up cryptography, I would have to start by assuming that

The problem with most net communication is that it is built with the assumption that the governments that it passes through are fundamentally friendly to the citizenry. Once DPI exists it is perfectly possible to just ban encrypted traffic to anything but a white list of banking sites etc, and then one has created a system where every letter can be read. It can be the perfect police state, and probably will be.

Stenography is probably the only answer to this, but the traffic patterns are still recorded so on

so once the government concerned becomes aware that the receiver is hostile to them they can follow that social network back. It's not just Google who can work out probable friends of yours automatically.

In which case, all communication must be done using chain letters or multi-casting, so that the intended recepient is never unique.

Or twitter proxies, in fact. But you still have to find a way to tell the sender who to send to - any reciever (whether final destination or mere relay) has to advertise themselves to the sender, and thus also to the intelligence services. Also, to get information out of the country any eventual sender must send traffic through the choke point (saving satcomms, but that doesn't scale). And at that point I can DPI for key words.

Once DPI exists it is perfectly possible to just ban encrypted traffic to anything but a white list of banking sites etc, and then one has created a system where every letter can be read.

And exactly how are you going to ban 'encrypted traffic' . There is no way to define what encrypt traffic looks like , that's one off the advantages of encryption.The test 'In Russia , mails read the government' , could be a slashdot meme , but it could also mean something entirely different , as you could replace the words with completely different data.

Sure there is: it looks like white noise. If you are scanning through packets, and you suddenly come across something that looks like noise, you can just drop it. We are not talking about secret codes that kids use when they are in kindergarden, we are talking about AES and similar ciphers, which are designed to have output that is as close to random noise as possible.

Then you'd have to white list a fair lot, or a lot of standard services we all love to use on the internet will cease to exist. MMOs encrypt their traffic to make it harder to write bots and other automatons. Skype uses a fairly nonstandard protocol, similar rules apply to other VoIP tools. And let's not even talk about various DRMified video streams.

You'll notice that they all are "somehow" encrypted, mangled, modified and nonstandard. Want to whitelist them all? Or block them?

That's only some forms of encryption. Other forms are more complex, and attempt to bury the encrypted message inside what appears to be legitimate data. Maybe the time is coming to start working harder on producing cryptographic systems that use these methodologies for normal consumer-grade hardware. If all your choke point is seeing is what look like perfectly normal sentences, with the actual meaningful data buried in it, it isn't white noise, and would require far more sophisticated means to even iden

I don't know where you got the idea that you can't block encrypted traffic. It's not like you really even need a distinguishing attack, just block all high-entropy content. Sure, some merely compressed content will get caught aswell, but so what? Even if you allow it though if there's some known signature (PK, RAR, JFIF, etc), you have a system which only a few hundred people in the country will have the capability to penetrate, and when they do, they're effectively excluded from the 'mass market' (your twitter, facebook, youtube, etc).

2. Block protocols when they expose encryption negotiation (STARTTLS, DHKE in instant messaging, etc), or all protocols that aren't whitelisted

3. Block HTTP/SMTP with encryption signatures (PGP/GPG blocks)

4. Block non-whitelisted high entropy connections.

What you're left with is steganography, and that's astrology to cryptologys astronomy.

You are under the false impression that clear text protocols can't be used to send encrypted messages over.Encryption has nothing to do with the protocols used to transfer it from one place to another.

I can put some encrypted message right into a mail, without there being any signature in it.

As for high-entropy content , it's just a matter of making the content look less random. Just put some fake structure in it , which makes it look like normal content.

you see the regime would love there to be no communications but they have to since young Iranians demand it. From what I can tell Iranians put up with the controls on public appearence/behavior because atleast in private they have outlets such as the Internet to express themselves, now with this under control too if I was an Iranian I would feel even more frustrated that it is creeping into their private lives. Maybe the youth have been placated with Internet and mobile phones but I'm hoping that whatever the outcome people will realise that the small luxuries that they are allowed to have can and will be used against them which in the longer term can only cause more angst and dissent.

The power of technology from a government's perspective is to have the subjects of your suspicion(citizenry) freely and enthusiastically enter all their beliefs( micro/macro blogging), the topology of their personal relations(social networking sites), and their personal communications(gmail) into the databases of private corporations for the easy mining of the data by the keepers of all the keys(NSA, MI5, and others). Then is is a simple matter to assemble an n-dimentional database of relationships into a large net. Then they need only to pull a single knot(a person) of this net and see all others strings and knots which are pulled also. With this tool the government can intercept and neutralize any waxing movement, meme, or influential person.

The classic mistake made by newbies (and slow learners) is to assume that stuff you put on the internet years ago somehow gets lost or forgotten.

It doesn't

Sadly some people in Iran, will learn this the hard way. When their security forces finally get around to processing all the blogs, tweets, SMS, emails, usenet posts, youtube videos, facebook entries and other permanent electronic records of comments they may have thought were innocent - or got caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment.

While it may only cost people in "free" countries a job offer or a place at university - these guys could end up paying with their lives.

And it may not only be the people inside Iran. I'm not sure what Iran's capabilities are for external intelligence operations, but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hear about a few of these people outside Iran that were leading the charge to set up proxies have unfortunate accidents.

The effects of this control have been seen over the past couple days, with only a few harrowing pictures and videos getting through Iran's closed net.

To properly judge the effects, you would have to know how many do not get through. If you're seing 100, but only 200 were sent, the effectiveness of the filter is 50%. But if 1000 were sent, it is 90%. You can't judge without knowing the second data point.

So maybe the filter effectively, or maybe the unrest isn't as large as the west makes it. Don't forget that the USA already staged a coup in Iran within the life time of many of us here. Who says the reporting about unrest and revolution is entirely true?

It just struck me how little difference there is between the rulers of Iran and our own.

Here in Germany, they just passed a law to censor the Internet wrt "child porn". A party leader held a speech yesterday essentially telling the citizens that they suck and should participate more in politics (and yet when they do, as with the record signatures petition against the child porn censorship law, they get ignored). Essentially, reminding me of Brecht who once said "If the people aren't to the liking of parliament, why doesn't parliament simply dissolve the people and elect a new one?"

Seems that people in power around the world share the same priorities. Most importantly: Staying in power and having control comes first. Everything else is secondary to that.

Maybe in a thousand years we'll look back at the early 21st century and shake our heads at how those ancient, primitive people could still have believed in government, states and the whole power structures. At least I hope that future generations will find better ways to govern themselves.

A very easy way to get your embassy closed down and all your staff thrown out of a country ios to go messing with that country's sovereignty. While you might think they're wrong and you're right - that does not give you (or any other government) the right to interfere in their internal affairs. How would you like it if the Iranian embassy in your country decided you weren't "islamic" enough and started broadcasting religious programmes all over your radio and TV channels? What you're suggesting is the exact

I presume you are also the kind of person who would stand idly by while your neighbor beats their child. Thankfully others do not suffer from the same moral cowardice

Riiiight. And you're "in-country" at the moment are you? Stirring up revolutionary fervour?

Or are you sitting comfortably in front of a computer thousands of miles away telling everyone else what you, in your safety and ignorance of the actual situation the citizens face, with all your experience of foreign affairs and dealing at inter-governmental level, think they should do?

Embassies may be involute foreign soil, but but that doesn't mean the host country has to let you keep operating them. They can say 'You have 24 hours until this embassy stops being an embassy. We will expect you gone by then.'

So "only a few harrowing accounts" have got through the blocks. If there were such a block in place it can't be very good then can it. Maybe the reason there are only a few, is because there are only a few anyway. I see more violence in the city centre on a friday night.

Since nobody else has posted this: there is an effort to take down the government "activist reporting" tool inside iran. Currently this is being organized largely by 888chan at http://888chan.org/iran/ [888chan.org] - note this site does contain nsfw content on some pages.

I'm not sure that I'm really for Ahmadinejad's competition, but there's not a whole lot of chance to make the situation worse by replacing a corrupt leader. If anything we can use the practice for countering government terrorism at home. I don't thin

As much as Americans like to villanize the Iranians for political reasons, this is all very tragic to see the will of the Iranian people crushed by a few corrupt individuals and a couple of religious zealots in top authoritative positions.

I thought America was bad after the past 10 years of political dictatorship by our own collection of criminals, including their gestapo arrest tactics, wiretapping of all internal communications, and general spying of all citizens. At least here in the US we can succeed at voting the assholes out. That took 8 years, but the task got done finally.

It was a positive development to see the Iranian people, through political process, want change and friendship with the west and we are all better off for it. Our hearts go out to you all and hope you can make the changes to your system that will give you the freedom you deserve. Perhaps the Iranian dictatorship should read up about the demise of General Custer and a few other selected figures from history. They may all find themselves one day swinging from the end of a rope, or worse.

You know, 'm getting rather tired of the United States being compared to autocratic regimes. It's apples and oranges. Was their abuse of power? You bet. Was the government stepping into areas that ought not be touched in a liberal democracy? You bet. But come on, even at his worst, Bush never had the sheer power the Ayatollahs do. Congress went along with him for a while, but that ultimately was only a few years, and the last two or three years of Bush's presidency was an absolute disaster for him an

ARPA's Internet project grows out of control, works against sister agency's insurrection attempt.

I don't look at it this way. My view on it is simple.

There are some things that technology does not change. There is simply no substitute for a large mob of armed (with melee weapons if necessary) and very pissed off people surrounding a capital and demanding either the resignation, or the head, of a tyrant. Information and argumentation and documentation, which is what the Internet is good for, are useful for making sure things don't get to that point. For the Iranians, it's a bit too late for that.

I was speaking strictly about how the people themselves may use technology to be more difficult to oppress. Your reply about how that technology may be used by the government to oppress the people is the other side of the coin.

Actually technology changes the number of people it takes to oppress an entire country. The current Iranian government is opposed by certainly at least a majority of Iranians, if not outright by 80-90% of the country. Yet those 10% manage to oppress the other parts quite effectively.

Corporation will _always_ help whoever has money and is willing to part with it. They don't care for good or evil, or a human concept of "morals". They won't refuse a good deal just because it's "evil", neither will they go out of their way to do "evil" if there's no profit to be made. It just happens that most profit is in immoral acts.

Or criminal acts, in which case penalties and the chance to get caught are factored in as cost position. Morals and consciousness have no place in corporate decisions, mostl

Corporation will _always_ help whoever has money and is willing to part with it. They don't care for good or evil, or a human concept of "morals".

That isn't a foregone conclusion, although it's true for virtually every corporation today. There's nothing, aside from greed, that prevents corporations from having ethics built into them. Look at Ben & Jerry's, for example; while I don't agree with every stance they take, the corporation honestly tries to be good guys.

Or criminal acts, in which case penalties and the chance to get caught are factored in as cost position.

That's exactly why revocation of the corporate charter should be the primary legal remedy for any provably intentional law-breaking on the part of any corporation. Upon revocation of the corporate charter, let all property of the corporation be sold at public auction and the proceeds divided among its shareholders. This would be a proper counterbalance to the "liability shield" nature of a corporation.

Corporation will _always_ help whoever has money and is willing to part with it. They don't care for good or evil, or a human concept of "morals".

Since it's pretty commonly acknowledged that the best (in the sense of most virtuous) things in life are free, I think you'll find that corporations are very much biased towards the "evil" (for want of a better word) side of the spectrum.

So help was your weasel word to pretend to be saying something without having to defend it.

It's more defensible than you think, though.

The fact is that Twitter is designed to be a fun thing for people to use in a relatively non-oppressive society. As such, it's designed under the assumption that they don't *want* criminals or terrorists on their network. So their design works in a free country but can be used against a populace or simply suppressed in an oppressive country.

The problem here, really, is that overthrowing a government is not a trivial exercise and the populace of Iran needs the proper tools. Seriously, is anyone surprised that something called "Twitter" isn't exactly military grade?

I think the GP meant that the __corporations__ of *Siemens* and *Nokia* are facilitating (aka "help"ing) to silence activists in Iran by providing deep-packet inspection tools to Government controlled telecom.

To that extent, a centralized government controlled data infrastructure can always be used for nefarious purposes, even if that wasn't the intent on installation. As for-profit companies, Nokia and Siemens probably approached the proposal by looking at the bottom line profit, not the moral implications. Its just business.

But regardless of the intent why the DPI machines were put in place, the possibility for good and evil are both increased in lock-step. Within the US our centralization and inspection of domestic data in the name of fighting terrorism takes us down a slippery slope, even though the possible (and likely) misuses of this data are swept under the rug.

There are those of us who believe that the only way to ensure free speech (and all the good and bad that accompany it) is to ensure societies ability to develop decentralized communications exchange,

I think a spokesman from Nokia claimed that installation of such systems is legally required to build a cellphone network in the western world, so it's not like they'd have had a strong moral standing to deny the sale.

Exactly - what the fuck is with people submitting stories to this site that need to attack Nokia-Siemens in the summary?

No one would get a contract to put a cell phone network in Iran unless it included a monitoring system - just like every Western country.

If there's any one to blame on this censorship/monitoring technology - blame Western governments - they're the ones that have put these requirements in place years ago. Engineers could have made these networks with sufficient privacy controls at the implementation phase, but no government will accept complete privacy - they always want a way to monitor activity.

If we truly believed in concepts of freedom of speech and expression, we would have voted in political members that would restrict monitoring technology. But our selection in politicians are rather limited, and they seem to lack the creativity to accomplish goals of national security without using highly invasive methods.

The body of memnock's post was exactly six words long, and you couldn't be bothered to read _all_ of them? So the rest of us are to judge memnock's meaning based on your interpretation, not on what memnock actually wrote? I don't think that memnock pretended to say anything that memnock did not actually say. You, on the other hand, are pretending to know what memnock "really" said . . .

Be careful what you wish for. I don't think any of the common encryption methods are very reliable any more (anyone know what REALLY is?) Either way, chances are your encryption has been undermined by some random (IT or non-IT) thing you got careless about ten years ago when you were drunk and had some woman (or stress or depression or just about anything else) on your mind. Also, it's questionable whether even the best encryption isn't within gov

Attach a bunch of encrypted truly random data to every mail you send. It would be unbreakable, yet almost impossible to prove it's not simply very good encryption. They're then faced with the problem of either white listing everything you send, or getting a pile of unbreakable crap stacking up with no way to easily sort out which, if any, of the mails contain anything they're even remotely interested in.

For now, AES remains impossible to directly crack. "Directly" being the operative word -- cryptography systems involving AES can be cracked through various other means. You start sending encrypted mail, and the first thing I will do is see if I can get a keystroke logger on your computer, perhaps a hardware unit that I install in your keyboard. If I cannot do that, I'll see if I can perform a side channel attack -- perhaps I can install a microphone near your computer to measure the vibrations caused by

If there has been on country that has benefited from the US "adventures" in Afganistan and Iraq it has been Iran, the US can't do anything to Iran at the moment it is too stretched out both financially and militeraly hence Obama recently changed tack from the previous threating stance. The Iranian leadership know this and that is why the continue with their nuclear program.

I also don't think there is any chance of another coup, there could be a counter-revolution but if this happens it will be because of the youth. Would the US like a counter-revolution, of course they would and the ayatollah is using this argument however the people are n't stupid and we should give them that much credit.

I agree with you in principle - that the last 6 years have made it easy for extremists to find recruits, but you're fundamentally wrong about the demographics. Al Quaeda is Sunni, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, the vast majority of the Islamic world is Sunni. The Shia are the majority in Iran, and the population is pretty mixed in Iraq. They spend more time and effort fighting each other than they do fighting the US.
This Sunni/Shia tension was held in check in Iraq by Saddam, whose propaganda machine was able

I didn't say the majority of Saudis were Shia. I should have clarified that I was speaking about the Saudis who live in the oil rich north of the country on the border with Iraq.

According to every source I've seen, a majority of Iraq is Shia, in a 60/40 split. I guess a number of them could be dead or outside the country. Iran is a majority Shia. Al Qaeda may be made up of Sunni arabs, but aren't they trying to overthrow the Sunni leaders of Saudi Arabia and other secular Muslim nations? I imagine they are

I'm not sure if you're confused on the facts or not--it's unclear from your speculations, but just for the record al-Qa'ida is not a Shia organization. While al-Qa'ida in *IRAQ* (see below) might specifically target Shiites, Bin Ladin has in the past made attempts to gain connections with Shia groups (though he has denounced at times as well!).

Also, FWIW, whiel you got the terminology correct, when people talk about the "Shia crescent" however it's usually said to start in Lebanon. It's not exactly a new thing either!

In fact think of al-Qa'ida as a brand, or an overarching corporate entity. Then you have terrorist franchises -- almost all of which ALREADY existed -- that affiliate with al-Qa'ida for name and fame. Thus you have what we call AQI -- Al-Qa'ida in Iraq and they call al-Qa'ida in the land of the two rivers or variants thereof, you have AQIM -- Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (North Africa), etc. How closely are these various groups linked to Bin Ladin? Many not very closely at all. Bin Ladin and AQ are basically lessons in branding, and a brand that globally is LOSING mindshare right now. I would completely DISAGREE with your assertions about al-Qa'ida in Iraq, and point to the awakenning councils as just part of the evidence as to how al-Qa'ida has managed to estrange its base! Unfortunately with the terrible job ALL (and I mean ALL) American news media does covering terrorist organizations, the Iraq war, etc, this is poorly understood and poorly reported on. Thus you get every armchair analyst in the western thinking they understand the complex interrelationships between Sunni and Shia, al-Qa'ida and the Iraq war, etc. The correct answer? "It's complicated.";)

If Al Qeada continues to enjoy the recruiting bonanza of US forces in this area, there's a good chance bin Laden will get the war he was looking for between the west and the muslim world. All he has to do is pull of another terrorist attack inside the US.

You're wrong (IMO of course) about any "recruiting bonanza" that translates into anything greater than jihad in Iraq, etc. America has avoided many of the Russian mistakes in Chechnya and Afghanistan that made this an issue. Furthermore, popularity numbers for al-Qa'ida as a whole due in large parts to the actions of al-Qa'ida in Iraq are down.

Lastly, if you're even REMOTELY right about any of your facts, what is taking so long for al-Qa'ida and Usama to plan an attack in the US? There are any number of extremely devastating attacks that could be pulled off easily, cheaply, and with only a few people -- so what's the hold up?

That doesn't make much sense. France sent the Continental Congress and the Continental Army money and other support during the American Revolution, all as part of France's scheme to undermine the British Empire. Apparently foreign aid does work in some revolutions.

Wrong by what standard? Revolutions, at least in the last 250 years, have often taken place within the context of wider disputes. France helped the American Revolutionaries because it would hamstring their chief competitor on the world stage? Certainly the Revolutionary leaders knew this, but they needed the help.

Can it backfire? Well yes, and even in the case of France, the expenditures only compounded severe fiscal problems, and within a few years, poor ol' Louis was lighter the weight of his head.

If you don't consider terrorism a problem, and have no actual respect for democracy and the right of a people to their own self-determination, then yes, it's safe to ignore arguments against ignoring another country's sovereignty.

I don't think anything is that black and white. Should we encourage every democratic uprising? You bet. Should we get involved in every democratic uprising? Nope. But I think towards the revolutions in many Eastern Bloc countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The West offered support, and, for the most part, it's worked out very well, though Russia clearly doesn't think so.

The reason not to interfere in Iran is because there is a very deep strain of anti-Westernism in the country, even among

"Nearly always" is your way of acknowledging that a lot of people, including Obama, have a whole lot of egg on their face about Iraq, and that you know damned well there's a big difference between "invader" and "aggressor."

Do you think we're going to abandon our permanent military bases in Iraq [globalsecurity.org]? Do you think we're going to allow Iraq to take back control of their own oil resources? You do know that we own them now [nytimes.com], don't you?

If we're invaders and not aggressors, we'd just leave the military bases and oil fields to Iraqis, and we would have left after their first election. But we're not going to leave, so stop pretending.

That's pretty much the way the western world works. History only goes as far back as is convenient for the excuses of the next colonial venture.

Thank you for sharing that. What a refreshing contrast to the pissing contests, excessive showmanship, shallow thinking, deliberate polarization, and overall mental garbage exhibited by shows like Sean Hannity or the O'Reilly Factor. With those two shows in particular, even when they are right they are wrong because edification is the very last of their goals if it is even on the list.

There is unfortunately a shortage of men who will stand up for what they believe to be true and challenge the party lin

This is not so clear cut. The Northern Alliance was recognized as the government of Afghanistan, but by any definition of government, it did not govern Afghanistan. The Taliban were the defacto government of the country, period. The Northern Alliance controlled less than 10% of the territory, and looked as if even there it would ultimately falter.

So no, the reality in international law is that the defacto government of Afghanistan did not invite NATO in. It was a useful fiction for the US to recognize t

Uh, the US didn't recognize the Taliban as the leader of Afghanistan. Neither did any country except Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, nor did the UN, and Saudi Arabia withdrew their recognition prior to the war. When I refer to the government of Afghanistan, I mean the real one, not the Taliban pretending he's in charge.

Add in the fact that our attacks are, and have always been, assisted by the Afghani Army, and I'd say we were not invading. You might as well claim that the US has been an occupied country for over a century. After all, Congress was dissolved by Emperor Norton, and the standing Army they've formed is therefore clearly a rebel force.

To put it more succinctly, we're not required to acknowledge every insane person with a couple of guns that claims leadership of a nation.

Then why did we give them 40 million dollars? Did we make an announcement saying, hey, we support the Taliban... no. But giving them 40 million dollars makes them a client of ours.

When I refer to the government of Afghanistan, I mean the real one, not the Taliban pretending he's in charge.

You cannot change the definition of real out of convenience. If you give 40 million dollars to a group of people who claim to run a country in exchange for their help in the drug war, who are you recognizing as the ruler of that country?

Add in the fact that our attacks are, and have always been, assisted by the Afghani Army, and I'd say we were not invading.

That's par for the course in colonial methods, and even matches the methods of straight-up aggr